Gabriele novel fuelled by rage, inspired by ‘Rebecca’
More than 50 years before Laura Palmer’s lifeless body washed up on a riverbank in Twin Peaks, there was Rebecca. The titular character from Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic novel stakes a claim as the original “dead girl,” a voiceless ghost whose life and murder are pieced together through the prism of other people’s stories.
Lisa Gabriele is a dedicated Rebecca fan. She first discovered the story — about a woman who is haunted with jealousy over her husband’s dead exwife — through Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Gabriele owns several copies of the novel, and there’s a poster of the film hanging in her bathroom. Her obsession over what was also her mother’s favourite book has become something of a family joke.
Gabriele recalls getting into an argument with an ex-boyfriend over Rebecca months before Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The story was still lingering in her mind when, like so many other women, she felt an acute “blast of anger” over Trump’s impending inauguration. “The American elec- tion galvanized me,” she says. “I felt an overwhelming wave, this sense that men have been getting away with a lot.”
It had been a year since Gabriele’s pseudonymous erotic S.E.C.R.E.T. trilogy — written under the pen name L. Marie Adeline — became international bestsellers, sending amateur literary detectives on a hunt to uncover her identity. Gabriele, also a television writer, producer and director, most notably as a show runner for the reality show Dragon’s Den, was on the lookout for a new book idea. Her rising anger, when combined with a rewatch of the film Rebecca, became a potent mix and fuelled the inspiration for her sixth novel.
“Rebecca is about men telling stories about women that we believe without question,” says Gabriele, who had come to view the character as a feminist icon whose voice had been taken away. “I wanted to write a book that featured stories women told about themselves, with the conundrum of who to believe.”
Gabriele’s new thriller, The Winters, is an homage to du Maurier’s most famous title, but with a few contemporary twists. Like the original, the story is told from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist who becomes entangled with a much older powerful man. After a whirlwind romance and engagement to rich politician Max Winter, she is swept away to his secluded Long Island estate. Everywhere she turns, there is a reminder of Max’s first wife — the beautiful, glamorous Rebekah, who died two years before in a fiery car crash. Soon, The Winters’s narrator begins to feel trapped in the house and in her obsession with the deceased woman.
Du Maurier, who detested when people misrepresented her book as a romance, always stated that Rebecca was a study of sexual jealousy. Gabriele’s narrator spirals, constantly comparing herself to the dead first-wife, but her jealousy is less driven by Rebekah’s flawless physical appearance than it is about playing parent to Dani, Max’s vengeful 15-year-old daughter, who won’t let go of her mother’s memory, and has even built a shrine in her honour.
“When Dani became real to me, I knew I had a book. She was the nexus around which the drama would evolve,” says Gabriele. “Every once in a while as a writer something just shoots out of you, and there it is fully formed. Dani was one such character.”
Dani is calculating in the sneaky way that only a teenager girl can be. Sweet one minute, miserable to everyone the next. She wields her Instagram account like a sword, aware that her soon-to-be stepmom is lurking through her photos. Initially, Gabriele worried that the ubiquity of Instagram filters and Google searches would diffuse some of her story’s mystery.
She wanted The Winters to have a similar timelessness as du Maurier’s, but realized it was impossible in this image-saturated era to duplicate that same experience. And so Gabriele gave herself over, and found new ways to use social media to ratchet up the book’s tension and anxiety levels.